


Survival

by Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, No Major Character Death, and Hannibal struggling to survive, and forgiveness despite everything, just a lot of Will trying to atone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-22 23:20:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10707255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent
Summary: Will walks away from the fall battered and bruised but essentially whole.Hannibal isn't so lucky, and Will knows that he is responsible for that.





	1. Chapter 1

This is what survival looks like -

It is Will, emerging from the water bloody and battered and half-drown but whole enough to walk away, searching frantically in the moonlight for Hannibal and finding him - finally - inert and cold as a dead fish, his heart still.

It is not knowing, the first time he presses his lips over Hannibal’s, if it is a corpse that he is attempting to imbue with his own living breath. It is compressing Hannibal’s chest again and again and again, though he can feel the broken ribs shifting under his palms and fears that he might inspire a ruptured heart or punctured lung, if the heart or lungs are not already ruined.

It is tasting the seawater in his own mouth when Hannibal chokes up what was suffocating him, and hearing the groans he makes when Will helps him turn over and rise to his elbows so he can vomit up a belly bloated with green water, the wrenching pain that Hannibal is too wrecked to deny or conceal, and it is discovering how fundamentally broken he has rendered Hannibal when Will tries to help him to his feet and Hannibal - indomitable Hannibal, Hannibal with his uncanny resilience and unstoppable vicious spite - makes it four steps on his broken leg, leaning heavily against Will, before blacking out and going limp as a corpse in Will’s arms.

Survival means making it to the road with Hannibal in tow, somehow, thinking all the time of those floating splitters of broken ribs and potential spinal injuries, wondering if he is making it worse by moving him but knowing that he can do nothing but move forward now.

And survival is flagging down the first car to pass them on that nearly empty road and killing the driver, and it’s seeing Molly in the man’s eyes as he kills him, and knowing that once again he’s paid back a fundamentally good hearted person’s desire to help him with betrayal and blood, and it’s going back to Hannibal - his monster, bought and paid for - where he left him on the side of the road and not being sure if he is even still alive until he pulls Hannibal up and something broken shifts and grinds inside of Hannibal and he screams in a way that Will never could have imagined Hannibal screaming, strangled and agonized and somehow childlike.

Will goes as far into the mountains as he can get on the gas that’s in the tank of the dead man’s car and the $43.00 cash Will found in his billfold, and when he finds the fishing cabin he is prepared, for the sake of survival, to kill anyone who might be inside, but the place is blessedly empty and Hannibal is still alive when Will opens the backdoor of the car and pulls him out.   

Later, once he has shower and concealed his mangle cheek under a gauze bandage and put on a dusty set of stolen clothes that he found in one of the dressers and that fit him only in the loosest sense of the word, Will takes Hannibal’s watch from his limp wrist and drives into the nearest decently sized town. The watch is an exquisite piece of workmanship that survived the fall and immersion that might well still undo its owner without so much as a scratch, and at the pawn shop Will gets five thousand dollars cash for it. He takes this, knowing that the damn thing is worth well over twenty times that and knowing that the pawnshop owner knows that he knows this but is rooking Will because they both also know how desperate he is and because he can tell that Will didn’t come by it honestly. Will seethes, but he sense the man’s own awareness of the handgun that he has under the counter, next to the panic button that will summon the police, and works hard to keep himself from vaulting over the counter and wrapping his hands around the man’s neck.

Will knows that if he is killed or captured then Hannibal will certainly die and he will die alone, so for the sake of survival he takes the five thousand dollars for the white gold Patek Phillippe Chronograph and because the pawnbroker is feeling just guilty enough about the deal he doesn’t demand any of it back when Will asks if he has any contacts who can get him some of the things that he needs quickly and without fuss.

A large chunk of the money that Will got for the watch goes to a financial irresponsible and ethically dubious medical intern, but he gets Will the supplies and drugs that he needs, and when Will gets back to the cabin Hannibal is still alive.   

There is not a single moment during that first week when Will is not certain that Hannibal won’t stay that way.

The pallor of blood loss is multiplied within a matter of days by infection, despite the antibiotics, leaving Hannibal alternating between chills that wrack his entire body and a blast-furnace fever that leave Hannibal and the linens soaked with sweat.

The fever dreams are very bad, and Will gains an intimate understanding of the types of screams that Hannibal is capable of producing. Not in his most vivid fantasies of killing Hannibal did Will imagine anything like those screams.

A time comes, four days after the fall, when Hannibal is too weak even to scream, and that is so much worse. The rise and fall of his chest is so shallow and so lacking in rhythm that during that sleepless night Will becomes convinced at least half a dozen different times that Hannibal has stopped breathing.  

But Hannibal is tenacious. He is stronger than even Will could have imagined, and he clings to life with only the aid of Will’s inexpert care and his own determined will to survive.

It’s day ten when Will sees Hannibal open his eyes and look at him, entirely lucid for the first time since he tipped them off the edge of the cliff.

When Will comes to him Hannibal’s arm snakes out from under the blankets and takes him by the wrist, and Will allows himself to be pulled down into the bed, though Will is terribly frighten of hurting him more than he already has, and of many other things as well.

It’s terrible, how thin Hannibal’s arms have gotten - how reduced his body is, the way that it has been eating itself in an attempt to survive the fever and everything else that Will has caused to happen to it.

He’s weak as a kitten, but Will has resolved not to fight him, no matter what, so he lays still while Hannibal curls his arms around him and uses Will’s body as a brace to pull himself closer.

Hannibal presses his forehead against Will’s chest, and his hair tickles the underside of Will’s jaw and his neck. Despite himself Will starts to tremble, because he remembers the times when this type of desperate clinging has ended with sharp blades and agony.

Will is so busy thinking about this that at first he doesn’t realize that Hannibal is crying, but after a few seconds it becomes impossible to miss because it is not the bitterly wounded tears that Will saw slip unheralded down Hannibal nose as he advised Will to opt for the ease of death by wading into the stream. The nearly silent sobs wrack Hannibal’s body, and before very long Will’s own body has begun to shiver in short bursts that match the convulsions that pulse through Hannibal’s own.

There are skeletal hands in Will’s hair, fingers tangling themselves in it and clinging as though their survival depends on it, and the front of Will’s shirt is wet from tears and he can feel Hannibal’s tears against his skin and despite that - because of it even - he is frightened, because though Hannibal is weak and unarmed his mouth is only a handful of inches from Will’s neck, and Will has seen what he can do with those teeth.

Will knows that if Hannibal decides to kill him it will be nothing less than what he’s earned.

He no longer doubts the love that Hannibal bears for him, but Will has seen the way wounded vindictive rage can sweep that love to the side, no matter how sincere or strong it might be. He’s bled twice for it already, and will always have Abigail's blood on his hands, and he has never done anything as deserving of retribution as this.

The sharp scent of blood catches in Will’s nose, and Will thinks that some of Hannibal’s stitches must have torn, and he says “Hannibal?” and Hannibal looks up at him red-eyed and wet, his cheekbones sharp as stone knives where the flesh has melted away, and he sees that Hannibal’s bitten his own lower lip and is bleeding.

 _What he is feeling was too big to get out,_ Will thinks, hardly conscious of the stinging tears that blur his own eyes. _Even with the crying it was too big and hurt too much._ And he is caught in sort of wonderment at that, and at how hard he’d worked to convince himself that Hannibal was calloused - that he didn’t feel things the way that Will feels them. It was a way of denying his own feelings, his refusal to grant credence to Hannibal's.  

“I dreamed you didn’t survive,” Hannibal says, and presses his face against Will’s chest again.

The sense of claustrophobia, for Will, is nearly suffocating, but the idea of pulling away is completely unbearable. Will lays with Hannibal’s arms around him, his own arms drawn close to his body, unsure of how to touch Hannibal, and even after Hannibal has passed back into sleep Will stays where he is.

Only the dinging of the alarm that Will has set to alert him that it is time for Hannibal’s next dose of antibiotics causes him to stir, but when he tries to get up Hannibal’s arms tighten around him again. There’s so little power in them, but they are insistent.

“Your meds -” Will begins.

Hannibal says, “Don’t go.”

Will bites his lower lip, recalling the blood on Hannibal’s own, along with so much else. “You remember what happened, don’t you?” Will asks him.

Hannibal does. His eyes are wide and glassy with the knowing, and Will feels the breath hitch in his own chest in anticipation of more tears.

The words need to be spoken. Or at least, Will feels as though he must say them to Hannibal. “I did this to you,” he says. “You almost died.”

He doesn’t say, _I’m still not sure that you’ll survive what I did to you_ , but he sees that Hannibal understands this perfectly well, and that the same fear is weighing on him.

But, despite all of this, Hannibal say, “Stay with me.”

So Will does.


	2. Chapter 2

Hannibal is alone when the bounty hunters come for him.

He’s been by himself so rarely this past month. Will is almost always with him when he is awake, and Hannibal’s dreams revolve around Will.

They are nightmares, always. In them, Will dies. He drowns or is smashed against the rocks. The Dragon’s knife enters the side of Will’s neck, severing his jugular vein, and Will sways unsteadily as the bright spray of blood arcs into the air, but then his legs give out and he crumples to the floor. In the dreams, Hannibal uses the bone saw and he picks Will’s brain to pieces until Will isn’t there anymore, and in the dreams Will lifts his hands away from the place where Hannibal cut him and wades into the stream defiantly, denying Hannibal his forgiveness and himself for all of time.

In the dreams, Jack’s bullet finds Will’s lung instead of catching him in the shoulder and he chokes on his own blood despite all of Hannibal’s efforts. Encephalitis lights Will’s brain up with such a bright heat that he strokes out, and never wakes up again. Tobias cuts Will’s throat with a sharp length of wire and Garrett Jacob Hobbs has a gun and he uses it before Will can raise his own and everything is over with before it even began.

It is a reverse cinematography of everything Will has survived to bring the two of them here now, the endings of each chapter along the way twisted out of true, and those are not the worst of the nightmares. There are nights when a translucent wall springs up between himself and Will, and Will turns and walks away from him, and when Hannibal calls out he does not stop and Hannibal never knows for certain if this is because he has no voice or if Will hears him but does not care. He has woken himself shouting from that dream, many times, and woken Will as well.

Will has stayed close to Hannibal. He remembers seeing Will though the haze of fever, sitting by his bed and watching him intently. It seemed as though Will was always there, regardless of the hour, and since Hannibal has become well enough to leave the bed little has changed.

Will is attentive. His eyes are always on Hannibal, following him through the cabin as he familiarizes himself with the use of the crutches. He knows Hannibal’s wants and needs before he voices them, and Will does his best to satisfy these while working within the limitations of their current situation.  

Hannibal doesn’t quite know what to do with such a guardian. Before, Will had rarely been especially nice to him, even at the best of times, and this hyperfocused protectiveness is not exactly kindness. It is a type of dedication, born of equal parts repentance and love, and the mixture is heady enough to reduce Hannibal to tears at the slightest provocation.

His own feelings sit closer to the surface than he is used to, but Hannibal is in no way ashamed of himself. He’s waited long enough to have Will near him, and he takes eagerly now all that Will is willing to offer, which seems to be everything.

It was Hannibal’s idea that Will take the fishing gear he’d found in the cabin and go down to the stream to see what he might catch, so Will is not there when the bounty hunters descend on the cabin.

Hannibal has no doubt that they know what he is - they will have been told, in great and graphic detail, what he is capable of doing - but they disregard that knowledge because he looks so feeble. He has seen himself in the mirror, so he knows that it is understandable that they might consider him too beat up and worn down to be capable of any great harm, certainly not against trained men in their prime. 

As he is able to kill only three of them before he is overpowered and shackled hands and feet to one of the kitchen chairs, Hannibal supposes that he must concede that he is not at his best, but there’s one concession; when a fourth leans in gloat, Hannibal dislocates his own thumb to slip the handcuffs, and he’s broken the man’s jaw and grasped his tongue between his teeth and torn it out before the others can beat Hannibal away, and just before the crack of a pistol butt against the side of his head blurs Hannibal’s vision he has the added satisfaction of hooking his finger into one of the man’s eyes and putting it out.

It is in the midst of the chaos of three of the remaining bounty hunters attempting to staunch the bleeding and quiet the man’s incoherent shrieking while a fourth works Hannibal over with his fists that Will crashes through the door.

Will puts a bullet point-blank into the head of the one that’s beating Hannibal, and the body falls on top of Hannibal and topples over the chair to which Hannibal has been shackled. Hannibal’s vantage point is poor, but he can see Will close on the others, shooting two more and then dropping the empty gun and grappling with the last as the bounty hunter reaches for his own gun.

The gun barks and Will and the bounty hunter both fall to the ground, outside of Hannibal’s line of sight.


	3. Chapter 3

Frustrated rage tears at Hannibal, helpless in his binds. 

There’s a struggle happening on the other side of the bed, where Hannibal can’t see, but his ears are still ringing from Will’s gun discharging so close to his head and Hannibal can’t tell who has the advantage. Everything is further confused by the pained rasping of the man that Hannibal mauled.

Hannibal is still shackled to the kitchen chair at the wrists and one ankle, and is trapped on his side with the body of the first bounty hunter Will killed on top of him. That man had tightened Hannibal’s cuffs when he bound the arm that Hannibal had gotten loose, and now that there is not enough give to pull free, even with his thumb already dislocated. His hands are growing numb. His leg in its cast is underneath him, aching, but any concern Hannibal might have that the knitting bones might have been rebroken is distant, far away from his list of priorities.

 He hears Will hiss with pain, and then the gun discharges again. A short pause, followed by a third shot.

“Will?” Hannibal says, but gets no answer. There’s a desperation in him to shout out the name, to scream it until his throat ruptures, if that will win him an answer. He tries to still himself instead, thinking how to get free from his chains.

Hannibal hears someone crawling towards him, scrambling on all fours in the hurry to reach him, and Hannibal knows even before Will rounds the end of the bed that it is him. His heart rate slows, reapproaching its normal rhythm.  

There’s a gash in Will’s forehead, and Hannibal isn’t sure how he got it but the blood is flowing heavily from it, coating a third of his face and dripping down the side of his chin, and before Hannibal can speak Will says, “Are you okay?” and then Will is on his knees in front of Hannibal, pushing the dead man off from on top of him and running his hands over Hannibal’s body, searching for injuries.

“Who had the keys?” he asks Hannibal, and Hannibal jerks his head towards the body of the nearest bounty hunter. There’s a tremor in Will’s hands as he undoes the shackles.

He helps Hannibal up from the floor, pulling him up into the bed.

“Are you okay?” Will says again, and Hannibal feels his eyes start to burn.

“I think that I am,” Hannibal says, speaking around the lump in his throat. “But Will - you’re bleeding.”

Will swipes at the blood dripping over the side of his face as though he was just noticing it. “Huh,” he says, and when he blinks Hannibal sees drying blood gumming his eyelashes.

The bounty hunter that Hannibal mauled is still alive, and Will and Hannibal look towards him as one when he tries to rise to his feet. He doesn’t make it halfway to standing before his legs fold under him and he collapses back against the wall.

“I’ll be right back,” Will says, and slides off the bed. Hannibal sees the stiffness in the way he moves and knows that the man he’d grappled with must have gotten some good hits in before Will shot him.

 The last surviving bounty hunter struggles to stand again when he sees Will coming for him, but Will places four fingertips against the center of his chest and shoves gently, and the man falls back down. A desperate and despairing noise comes out of his throat.

Will crouches in front of him.

He has a knife, and he shows it to the man. Then Will says, “look me in the eyes,” and when the man tries to move his head to track the knife with his one remaining eye, Will takes him by his ruined jaw and forces the man to look at him.

When Will takes his hand away from the man’s face his eye stays locked with Will’s own. "Good," Will says, and he is calm as he looks back at the single eye, which is glassy with terror and from the tears that it’s shedding. Will nods, satisfied, and tells the man softly, “You shouldn’t have hurt him.”

The eye is still on Will’s own when the knife goes into his belly, and the force of Will’s gaze holds it even as he jerks the blade upwards towards the sternum, opening him up. Even as confusion begins to replace the agony reflected in the eye as his brain starts to shut down, it stays on Will’s own, blinking at first very quickly and then more slowly until at last it is still.

The man isn’t dead yet - he’ll be another few minutes bleeding out - but Will’s interest in him is finished.

He fades from Will’s mind the instant he turns back towards Hannibal. Hannibal sees it happen, and understands that the knowledge of the man’s lifeblood pouring out of his belly is as inconsequential to Will as the flow of water over a river stone.

The sense of having built better than he knew strikes Hannibal powerfully. He finds himself - not for the first time - filled with awe at what he has found in Will, the thing of beauty that Hannibal nurtured and fed and brought into this world, and astounded at how much bigger and brighter it is than Hannibal himself.

In that moment he feels eclipsed by Will, old and faded beside a staggering new potential that has only begun to bloom. He is afraid, almost, of being left behind - at the possibility that Will might move so far beyond him that Hannibal will not be able to follow.

But the smile Will gives Hannibal as he crawls into the bed with him is gentle and full of devotion, and that calms the fear in Hannibal’s chest at the same time it inundates him with a new sense of awe.

Sliding up behind Hannibal, Will curls his arms around Hannibal’s shoulders and nuzzles his neck. Hannibal feels the breath catch in his throat. A welter of emotions fills him, defines him along a new series of lines, as Will has been redefined.

It’s overwhelming, and when Hannibal begins to cry again he is neither surprised nor ashamed.

Will’s arms tighten around him, protective and possessive. He rests his chin against Hannibal’s shoulder and speaks softly into Hannibal’s ear. “I was afraid that they’d killed you,” he says. And then Will says, “I love you. I couldn’t live without you.”

It’s all too much. It is everything Hannibal has longed after for years now, everything that he has given up the life he’d built for himself to get, all the time never really daring to believe entirely that he might actually have it, and it is too much. He feels the sobs build up inside a chest that still aches from poorly healing ribs - that will never, for as long as he lives, entirely stop aching from those old hurts - and when they come out he feels as though they might tear him apart.

And yet, despite all the pain that brought him here and all the pain that the crying brings, he is happy. It is happy sobbing, and he is as helpless to stop it as he has been any of the other tears that have seized him since he woke up in this place.

They will need to leave soon, Hannibal knows. The bounty hunters will have been in the employ of the Verger-Bloom family, doubtlessly, and when they don’t make contact with their organization another wave of men will descend on the cabin. The FBI has been steadfast in the belief that Will and Hannibal are dead, or at least they have claimed so in press releases, but that position will change very quickly once the bodies are found.

The hunt is about to begin in earnest, and this time Will and Hannibal will be the game. They must get ready.

But Hannibal lets Will hold him for a while longer first, waiting out his own tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this morning's update was short, but I am glad that I broke it apart and waited until I'd gotten some sleep to try to finish this section, because I think it came out a lot better as a result. 
> 
> There's at least one more chapter to this story (and probably it will involve a lot of ecstatically-happy-awed-weepy sex, lol) though I might go back to the Identically Different AU for a couple of chapters before I wrap up this one.

**Author's Note:**

> Might be a couple more pieces to this story (especially if there's interests in a "clingy Hannibal fights his was through a long and difficulty recovery, while Will's guilt and his love for Hannibal keeps Will hyperfocused on his well-being" spin on post-final events) but I'm not completely sure yet.


End file.
